Don’t Worry

Goooood morning everyone! Well, it’s morning where I am, anyway, in sunny Alberta. I’ve got a good progress report for you this week. We successfully ironed out some bugs in our movement system. You would think that getting a wrestler to walk and run around the ring would be a basic task and you’d be right. But we went and developed this pretty complex state/condition system that controls what combat actions happen when you press a button.

See, the PWX engine is constantly tracking where your character is in the level, whether you are walking inside or outside of the ring or on the apron, whether you are running in or out of the ring or on the apron, whether you instigated the run or if you are running because you were irish whipped, and whether you targeted the ropes, turnbuckles, or your opponent at the start of your movement.

All of these states are simultaneously tracked for your opponent and every possible combination of each state between two players needs to have a corresponding action if a button is pressed. It sounds like it can get to be a big system because it is. But the reason for doing it this way, believe it or not, is to simplify the experience for the player. Because the PWX engine always knows what states both players are in you can execute an appropriate action every time. Nothing illogical should happen.

In other words, if you hit the button normally associated with strikes you will always deliver the strike most appropriate for your opponent’s position. You’ll never deliver a dropkick to a lying opponent, you’ll never do an elbow drop to the middle of the ring if your opponent is on the floor, and you won’t try to do a flying elbow drop if your opponent is standing instead of lying.

It works well so far but it’s made for some unforeseen bugs (aren’t they all) that we’ve had to hunt down and squash this week as well. We were getting funky things happening like irish whips refusing to go diagonal outside the ring and players skipping their “bounce of ropes” animations when, well, bouncing off the ropes. It’s funny because all of this stuff was working fine before this week but everytime we make something else work better it invariably causes problems elsewhere.

No worries, we’ve fixed every bug properly and without digital duct tape. And once we’ve got nothing left to fix, the game ships. Weeks, baby, weeks. Thanks for hanging in there!

Missing Moves

Yukes removes moves from almost every iteration of their WWE games (not entirely sure why) and I recently stumbled across a list of the almost 300(!!!) moves removed from this year’s Smackdown vs. Raw. A lot of them can be replicated in the Create-a-Finisher feature but then it makes you wonder again why they were taken out in the first place: